After 2 months, I will be a one-year-donhost reseller. But that doesn't mean I am happy about that. I have to tell you I was treated like those Jewish in World War Two.


Overall Results:
-------------------
Support - 8/10
Service - 3/10


At the beginning of May, I found out the company, Donhost. I asked Daniel many questions.
Examples: Cost for additional data transfer, MX Record Changes, when's Daniel's birthday (Oct 18), etc.
That's his real birthday IF he told the truth.


May -> June
At the end of May, I joined Donhost. I started accepting members in June. I remember there were a few downtimes (about 3-5) in June and my customers weren't happy with them. Some of them wanted to leave too. However, Donhost extended the billing days which was nice.


July -> Sept
I had a female customer joined my hosting. Remember I gave out the 5GB Space and 10GB Plan?? Yes, she joined that one. I don't quite remember her name :(. I had a good time with her while she was my customer. But then a few months later, her account had a problem. I noticed when going to her site http://www.pianopaula.com, it showed not found, but still, her account was existed in my reseller control panel. Strange?? This happen was because the admins changed the her www directory.
Before: /home/p/i/pianopaula/public_html
After: /home/p/i/pianopaula/public_html.old

I had to contact Daniel when I found out the directory was renamed. It was about 5:00 -5 GMT and Donhost office was closed. Because their office was opened at 9:00 GMT until 5:00GMT, nobody could help me to rename the directory. Perl script can't rename that directory because I have no root access.
The only way I could fix this was to write my own program.
What I made her site backup was to write a perl script which copys everything under her "public_html.old" directory to a temporary directory in my own account. The process took about 10 mins. After copying it, I removed her account and re-created it. I copied everything from my temporary directory to her new "public_html" directory and it took another 10 mins. Her site was backup. :) I can tell you it was hard to backup her files. I couldn't backup her files was because she had thousands of images and html files. I remember there were over 2000 files. And all are stored under the public_html directory. It took quite a while to load the list of files via FTP. The public_html thingy and backing up her site werenot the major problems. After a few weeks, her account was removed. I was tolded not to host her site because Daniel said her site consumed too much CPU resource. I can see that he was lieing because if you go to www.pianopaula, there is no scripting files. (ALL HTML FILES) She didn't even know how to program. Then only reason her site was removed was because she was using too much data transfer. About 10GB per month. OK, then I reported the reasons to her why her account was removed. I had an arguments with her for a couple of days, then she left me alone. :(

I then do weekly backups for my users. All files of each account would be packed to .tar.gz file. I downloaded them every week. Then Daniel found out that I did backups for my customer, he told me he does daily backups for the entire server. Because of that, I wouldn't bother doing any backups for my clients.


Oct -> Jan
Two problems occured between this period.
I used to host Burning Board Hacks. A few months later, their site was deleted because Daniel said the account "wbb" is related to Hacking. I can tell he didn't even check the content before removing. I replied saying that the content of that site is about modifications of Burning Board. He didn't reponse after that. SO I agree with Ian White that Daniel doesn't responsible for his own actions. If you don't trust me, you can ask LastActionHero and Satelk. They were the owner of that account. Besides telling Daniel about the content of the site, the admins(LAH and Satelk) would like the data back. I then email Daniel and see if he could give me the data of their mySQL database back, and again no response.

Another problem is about mySQL. One of my customers installled VBull on his hosting account and his mySQL was damaged. This time, I am not sure what causes the error, but I remember something happened to the USER.MYD table. His database was damaged and his VBull couldn't load. Then what I tried to do was to export all data from his database and I saved each table in a file. But something wrong with the mySQL Dump and couldn't backup his database. Again, I contacted Daniel to fix his database. I don't remember what he said what causedthe error. It was something about indexes. Then his site was up. :). The day after, his database was damaged again. His site was down nearly 3 days and I had to backup each table into a text file. Re-created his account and restored his database back. This site was up and running again. I am unsure Daniel did damage the mySQL database on purpose. The owner's account didn't use too much data transfer. About 2GB per month.


Feb -> Now
A customer joined my hosting on Feb 27, 2002. His site was about gaming. On March 07, 2002, his account was removed. I checked my email but didn't find anything why his account was deleted. On the same day at 2:00pm -5 GMT, I email Daniel for the reasons. But I haven't received a single reponse until now. I can tell his account was removed with no reasons at all. All my accounts use about 8GB per month. His site consumed about 1GB in 10 days. The projected data transfer showed that his site would use about 4GB at the end of the month. The only reason I could think of is because he used too much data transfer. I couldn't find any reasons why his account was removed, so all I could do was to tell him that his account would use over my given data transfer limit. Right now, my client is asking me for backups. As I said earlier, Daniel convinced me not to do any backups for my clients, that's why I do not have the backup copy of his site.


My Comments:
1) If Donhost cannot afford the fee of their data transfer, they should set the limit to 10GB instead of 50GB. Then I wouldn't use over 10GB and wouldn't accept any more members. Therefore, it may reduce the problems which I mentioned above.

2) If he didn't remove my account with no reasons(the one that have just removed a few days ago), I wouldn't post this thread to the public. Another reason I am posting this is because my customer is asking me for backups. Now I am telling him (my customer) that I was not the one responsible for his data. It is Daniel's job. Daniel told me not to backup any accounts and said he did daily backups of the entire server. TO get your backups back, you should email support@donhost.co.uk. Not me.

3) Support is great. They reply very fast. Keep up the good work.

Last but not least, I hope Donhost will correct their attitudes towards their resellers. IF Daniel is reading this post, I hope my reseller my account will not be removed tomorrow. :)


Should I renew my reseller account in May? I think you all have the answer. Oh, and if you have want to know how I am going to survive after May. I bought my own Daddy Server yesterday! :D Now I just have to do GUI for the new control panel and waiting for my server to be setup.


At the end, thank you for spending your time for listening my comments, stress and history.

[EDIT]
I edited my spelling, grammer, etc ... because my english sucks :D

Why would you even consider staying?
1. By being a donhost reseller, that alone tarnishes your companies reputation.
2. Haven't they caused you enough headaches already?

After everything that has been said regarding the Don, don't you think your customers deserve better?

Why would you even consider staying?
I paid for my package yearly. So I have 2 months left.

1. By being a donhost reseller, that alone tarnishes your companies reputation.
I refuse to answer this question until I have moved everyone.

2. Haven't they caused you enough headaches already?
Yes. I stated the four major problems above. And a few small ones which I didn't mention.

Don't go with DonHost any more! You will loose customeers like yopu have then and they think a wBB Hacks site is like hacking into systems and getting data, LOL:stickout . Just rwesll another host!

NO more reseller in 2 months!!!!!!! YAY!!!

My friend and I spent money on daddy server and I am not going to be any more reseller.

Is why reselling in most cases is a scam. You are getting customers to sign up for "your" service -- when in fact you have no control WHATSOEVER in the destiny of how your customers are treated. You could be the best guy in the whole world -- yet still be powerless when the REAL host decides to crack the whip....Talk about being powerless...Much like a whore to the parent company....All the work of customer support, etc...yet no say in who gets the boot. *** Disclaimer: not all hosts would pull the same stunts as this....However -- if it looks like a duck, and talks like a duck....

Originally posted by YUPAPA
NO more reseller in 2 months!!!!!!! YAY!!!

My friend and I spent money on daddy server and I am not going to be any more reseller.
cool! if u wanted u could use www.apachetoolbox.com to get the server set up.

Originally posted by Haze
1. By being a donhost reseller, that alone tarnishes your companies reputation.

Complete and utter bollocks. We've had a Donhost account for over 12 months, and whilst its more of a side issue now to our own servers, we have customers who have stressed they must remain where they are on our Donhost account for the simple fact that we provide them with a great level of support, the control panel is the best you'll find and downtime is generaly unheard of now.

Yupapa, you've been claiming you're leaving Donhost and buying this "daddy server" since December last year. Around the same time one of your clients posted to FWS bashing Donhost because "it wouldn't be legal if they kicked me off their servers.... when i signed up with yupapa i wasn't informed of any TOS or AUP. Damn bas*ards".

Somehow it is Donhost's fault because you don't make your clients aware of the AUP they have to adhere to.

We give credit where credit is due, and there's not a single reseller network that can meet the Donhost model for price and reliability.

Cheers

Gary

With so many companies providing good quality reseller plans today, you really have no excuse to stay with Donhost. If you're still quite small, you could move your sites to another reseller account (MCHost and SplashHost both provide reseller accounts that may look a little bit more expensive than DonHost, but when you read the reviews you realize that it's worth paying just a bit more for quality).

Furthermore, MCHost at least also offer managed dedicated servers, so once you have more than a couple of sites, you can stop being a reseller and get your own managed server(s). :)

Originally posted by Editor

Yupapa, you've been claiming you're leaving Donhost and buying this "daddy server" since December last year. Around the same time one of your clients posted to FWS bashing Donhost because "it wouldn't be legal if they kicked me off their servers.... when i signed up with yupapa i wasn't informed of any TOS or AUP. Damn bas*ards".

Somehow it is Donhost's fault because you don't make your clients aware of the AUP they have to adhere to.

Cheers

Gary


I said I purchased the daddy server yesterday, not december last year. And about that customer saying that he got kicked off from the server. I did make the AUP clear. It says we don't host any audio or mp3 files that are copyrighted or not belong to the owner. Me and donhost were misunderstood that those files were belonged to somebody else. But at last, we found out that he is the owner. And we are still hosting his site currently.
His site is http://www.guitarnerd.com

There is always someone who defends donhost

Take a look through the forums and you will know who!

It is almost as if they are on a different setup to the rest of the customers as they have never had any of the problems the other 99% have had

The same as there's always "new" WHT members that want to take pot shots at them.

If you're referring to me "aargh", then you're wrong. We still suffered the same downtime last year when there problems to be had. We still get sites removed if they breach the AUP. Our clients on there still had no control panel on Christmas and New Years Day. We still pay the same amount as any other reseller. The only difference is we don't have any complaints. At all.

Yupapa, you need to make the AUP clear *before* people sign up then.

http://www.freewebspace.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=14972&perpage=15&pagenumber=2

"it wouldn't be legal if they kicked me off their servers.... when i signed up with yupapa i wasn't informed of any TOS or AUP. Damn bas*ards"

What does that tell you?

Gary

AUP can be found in the control panel as well as on my web site.
Most users must agree the AUP before signing up. If you were my customer, would you check my AUP before signning up OR after signning up???

Anyways, maybe he didn't check the AUP before signning up?

His site is still hosted by donhost, and I don't think there is a problem now. His account was removed is because donhost misunderstood that the audio files weren't belong to him.

Originally posted by YUPAPA
AUP can be found in the control panel

I know. I told your client that a few posts later on the same FWS page. He wasn't aware of any AUP before that when he questioned the legality of Donhost removing his account.

Gary

Originally posted by Editor
We still suffered the same downtime last year when there problems to be had. We still get sites removed if they breach the AUP. Our clients on there still had no control panel on Christmas and New Years Day. We still pay the same amount as any other reseller. The only difference is we don't have any complaints. At all.


I dont understand how having had those problems you have no complaints at all?!?

Originally posted by SuperDon
I dont understand how having had those problems you have no complaints at all?!?

That's all the problems we have had in over 12 months. We've had twice that with other reseller networks in a month (I wont go into details lest I upset some regulars).

The downtime I spoke of was mainly around June last year. We had regular feedback/updates, and passed those on. The 3 to 4 sites we have had removed have been due to illegal software. We were advised well in advance about the removal of access to the CP for a few days over the Xmas break, and passed that on.

The price is right. We have a few hundred domains on there, and all bar two or three they are very low usage sites. In that respect we're lucky. But they could be hosted anywhere...it's the level of service that we provide to our clients which means no complaints come to, or from us, about the Donhost model.

We've had some clients move on to get their own Donhost account. We still support them when they ask for tips. Same as we manage dedicated servers for others who have stepped up. For around US$45 a month Donhost offers a rock solid hosting environment with a control panel to die for, backed up with prompt and efficient support when needed.

How can we possibly complain about that?

I only had a crack at Yupapa because I still find some amusement in the Donhost bashing thread I linked to above where one of his clients is abusing them (Donhost) because that client had no idea that an AUP was in play. A Donhost account is like any other reseller account...you have to make sure all of your clients are aware of the terms of service that you (the reseller) are operating under as well as any of your own that you want to throw in. Donhost are not the only reseller network that kill/ban resource intensive processes/scripts.

At the end of they day, they're not for everyone. We all find what works for us. It'd be boring if there were text book answers to all of this.

Gary